Mailbag: The trouble with Texas & famous Beachers

The Mailbag is pretty sparse this week. Let’s see, we’ve got a Pennysaver and about 6½ pounds of campaign mailers, which have been helpful by pointing out the flaws of each candidate’s opponent. The flaws are richly varied, a beautiful tapestry of shortcomings.

Barring the emergence of further findings, we’ve settled on the candidate whose flaws don’t include having ties to Condoleezza Rice, Karl Rove or Texas.

An old-school, pre-Tea Party Republican whose name you know but we can’t mention because he was speaking to us in confidence, told us, “After Lyndon Johnson, the Bushes and Rick Perry, I’ll never vote for a Texan again.” That’s good enough for us. If you can’t trust an old-school Republican, who can you trust?

“Dear Mr. Grobaty,” begins a note from a non-campaigner who employs the honorific that invariably precedes the request for a favor.

“My son has to write a report on famous people who grew up in Long Beach for his fourth-grade class. Can you help with some names?”

Look, lady, we didn’t even do our own homework when we were going to school, and we’re not going to start now. Unless it’ll help fill up a column, in which case, we’ll go to the primary source material, which is a 40-page Press-Telegram magazine called WHO, which was published in 2003.

We would begin our fourth-grade report on famous people born in Long Beach with Charles Michael Kittridge Thompson IV who you, the hip parent that you are, know as the Pixies’ guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Black Francis (and, then, Frank Black).

Not big enough? Try Richard Bach, the Wilson High/Cal State Long Beach grad who wrote “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” Or Wilson alum and LBCC Hall of Famer George Chakiris, who only won an Oscar, is all, for his supporting actor role of Bernardo in “West Side Story.”

Or the ho-hummer Nicolas Cage who lived perilously close to us on Hackett Avenue. Cameron Diaz, who wouldn’t have anything to do with us back in high school, primarily because she went to Poly and was born a year before we graduated from Wilson. You want to go Northtown? Then you’re talking Dodger great Ron Fairly or his Bob (“Gilligan” or “Maynard G. Krebs” depending on your pop cultural take-off point) Denver, who was three years behind Fairly at Jordan High.

The list goes on and on (Snoop Whatever, for instance), but this should be good enough for a B-minus for a fourth-grade essay.

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“Tim,” is how our next caller, Pam, starts her totally reasonable request, which is based on the fact that we have had a complaint or two from vicious cranks who object to our occasional columns that mention our dogs Jasper and Annie, who were bred to kill and little else.

“Do NOT listen to people who tell you not to write about Jasper and Annie. My daughter and I love reading about your little pups.”

OK! Here are three things about our little pups since we last wrote about them.

1. Jasper can now sit on a box in dog class. Annie’s been able to sit on a box for a month.